2004

Sam and I were up at 5.00am. Abdul had arranged to take us to the airport at 7.00am but it was actually nearer 7.45am by the time we left, which just reminded me that Egyptians have no concept of being on time. When we got to the airport, there was a big queue of locals for the Cairo flight, but Abdul managed to persuade the police to let us go to the front of the queue as we were late. We checked in our luggage and they grumbled about the weight but let us through as we were the last to check in – the flight was due to leave at 9.00am. We hurried up to the cafeteria, only to be confronted by another big queue at the counter and there was not enough time for a last cup of coffee. At least we didn’t have long to wait and soon almost everyone else had boarded the busses so we thought we’d better go too. We were both very subdued but I felt OK as we climbed the steps on to the plane, with a last look around before going inside. It wasn’t until we were taxiing up the runway that Sam & I dared to look at each other. My cold suddenly got particularly bad and Sam put on her sunglasses and hid her head under a blanket. After about an hour we could speak to each other for the first time today! I really hate this bit.

We spent the flight talking about where we had been. We’ve covered a lot of Egypt this time, from the Delta and Cairo, right down through Middle Egypt and finally Luxor, even venturing south as far as Esna. The flight was good, the movie, as usual, unmemorable and we arrived in a grey wet London only half an hour late. The rest of the day entailed a long tiring drive down the motorways. Home eventually with all my memories of another fantastic trip until the next time.

I woke this morning to look out at the Nile and the mountains. This will be my last early morning view for a while as it will be dark when I get up tomorrow. Sam was in a funny mood at breakfast and said she doesn’t want to do anything today. But while drinking our many breakfast cups of coffee we realised that we absolutely had to go and reconfirm our flight with Egyptair, which should have been done three days ago. Maybe they’ve given our seats to someone else by now……? I said I wanted to go to the museum and Sam decided she would come too.

Sam and I walked down to the Egyptair office by the Winter Palace Hotel and had to wait almost an hour for our turn. At least they have a numbered queuing system now – it used to be a free-for-all with the Egyptians pushing in front all the time. They still do this but it’s not quite so bad. They still have our seats reserved – oh well…

Feeling lazy we took a taxi to the museum and spent about three hours looking around and taking photos of almost every exhibit. I took a complete set of pictures of the Amenhotep IV talatat wall this time and they should come out really well with the digital camera. I panicked a little when I went upstairs and found they’d moved Amenhotep Son of Hapu, my favourite statue, but eventually I found him in the new section. This is the first time I’ve seen the finished new extension and I thought it was very well done. The architectural and scribal exhibits are especially interesting. I didn’t visit the royal mummies because I hate to look at the faces of kings who should be enjoying their eternal rest, not gawped at by tourists. A big banner outside the exhibit welcomes Rameses back home to Luxor but doesn’t mention poor Amenhotep. Finally we had a look in the bookshop but there was nothing new there and the new coffee shop isn’t open yet.

Back to the hotel around 2.00pm. I toyed with the idea of going over to the west bank to say a last farewell to the temples but didn’t go because I’d probably just end up at Habu again. I had some articles to read and notes to catch up on so I just went and sat out on the terrace for a couple of hours on my own, enjoying the sunshine and trying not to think about going home tomorrow.

We had invited Abdul and Salah out for a farewell meal and Abdul said he’d been recommended a new restaurant called Habiba, out towards the bridge. It’s owned by Blue Skies tour company and it’s a vast place by the river. We realised when we got there that it was really intended for coach loads of people (and we were the only ones there). They did a buffet meal, kept warm like in a hotel, which none of us were very keen to try, so we just had a lemon juice and left, much to the disgust of the manager. The decor in Habiba is beautiful – oriental in style which was obviously very expensively done and it was worth going just to see this. There were wonderful wall lamps and floor tiles and fabrics. Salah even surreptitiously took some pictures with his phone camera for ideas for his house he says he’s going to build. Eventually we ended up at Maxims again. Everyone was in a bit of a funny mood and nobody was saying much. Sam had raging toothache again and I still have a streaming cold, which didn’t help. Afterwards we went to the Etap (just for a change) and sat listening to Maha sing Arabic songs. Abdul and Salah kept getting a bit silly – I think it was their way of trying to cheer us up, though they wouldn’t share their jokes. There was one Omm Kulthoum song which they were both listening to intently. It was a love song about a man who will wait forever for his love. Watching the two men listening was so funny – Abdul had a big grin on his face and was obviously enjoying the music very much, while Salah had his face screwed up and looked like he was dying of an emotional overdose. You’d have thought they were listening to two totally different songs. This amused Sam & I greatly but they couldn’t understand what we found so funny. We left the Etap around 12.30am and dropped Salah at the ferry, then Abdul drove Sam and I back to the hotel. I didn’t get much sleep because I sat on the balcony until 2.30am, just taking in the never-sleeping sounds of Luxor.

A faint pale promise of daylight was just beginning to colour the sky when I went out onto my balcony this morning, but the freezing night air still enveloped me in my light nightdress. Today was our chosen day to drive to Kharga, having missed the opportunity to go the slightly shorter route from Asyut because I was ill. Abdul told us that the direct road from Luxor was now open to non-Egyptians, so we decided to go just for the day. Sam had been planning to drive us on our own, but Abdul invited himself saying it was too far for her to drive there and back in a day, especially when he heard that we had invited our friend Salah to come along as he had never been there. I have developed a horrible cold but I was determined not to let it spoil my day.

By 7.00am we were driving across the Nile bridge and south on the West Bank towards Armant and the desert road. Colourful birds skimmed the surface of the misty canal looking for breakfast as we speeded along the empty road, with only an occasional donkey cart with its sleepy driver to slow us down. The police at the checkpoints weren’t bothered about us this morning, though a bit puzzled by Sam driving, they just radioing ahead to say ‘itnein Inglezi’ (two English) at every stop. I guess they’d only worry if we didn’t eventually turn up somewhere. Within about an hour we were up on the escarpment and then it was just a long very straight road for about 300km. Sam was driving, with Abdul fast asleep in the front seat, supposedly to keep an eye on her roadcraft, with Salah and I dozing in the back seat.

Sam and Abdul were both bored stiff by the drive, which they have done several times before. It’s a good road now and you can see parts of the old road here and there. When a dune encroaches on the road they have to just build a new road around it until the dune has moved on. Nothing will stop them. The desert here is rather flat and colourless – a bit like the drive from Aswan to Abu Simbel, but I always love being in the desert. Half way into the journey I noticed an elaborate bus stop, looking like the entrance to some forgotten ancient temple, at the side of the road, but not a house for 100km in either direction. After about two hours we began to descend the Kharga escarpment and down into the depression of the Oasis to a place called Bagdad, and another checkpoint. We had hoped to avoid picking up a police escort, but here at the checkpoint they decided to come with us and we drove the further 70km into Kharga City. Though it’s called a City, this small town rambles along the road through the oasis, a scattering of old and modern buildings between an occasional plantation of palm trees with nothing very distinctive about it.

Our plan was to visit Hibis Temple and try to get into the hypostyle hall and sanctuary where there are some unique reliefs. The gafir however, told us that it is closed (always has been!) and he couldn’t let us in without permission from the antiquities inspector for Kharga. He wouldn’t take baksheesh and even Salah couldn’t charm him. So off we went back into town to see a lovely man called Mohammed Yusseff, a friend of Sam’s and the director of the Kharga Museum. He tried to get permission for us from the Inspector but couldn’t. He even phoned the SCA office in Cairo and spoke to the lady who issues our antiquities permissions and then Sam spoke to her too. I think Mr Yussef would even have phoned Zahi Hawass himself had he not been out of the country. He was really upset that he himself didn’t have the authority to give us permission to get into the temple. The Cairo office told us it would cost $1000 each to have sites specially opened for us under the new rules. We must have been just lucky up to now with closed sites. This is why the large specialist travel firms have to charge such vast sums for some of their holidays – because they have to buy permission for the sites that are closed. Anyway, we were rather disappointed and after a cup of coffee with Mohammed we left for the temple again.

I was also a bit disappointed to find that the whole temple was covered by scaffolding because of restoration work. There used to be a huge gate through the outer enclosure wall, quite famous for its Roman inscriptions and decrees covering all sorts of topics about Roman rule in the oasis. There has been a plan for the past 20 years to dismantle and move the temple, which has been falling down ever since it was built , and work began a couple of years ago. Rather than get the experts in, the government decided to go for an Egyptian construction contractor who quickly chopped the gate down to about the bottom two courses. In the process they have ruined it and it can never be rebuilt as it originally was. We first learned about this last year – it is not common knowledge outside of Kharga. Mohammed Yussef was talking to us at the Museum and he is livid about it and the fact that it is being kept quiet. It is so sad. The dismantling has thankfully now been halted again, but it is too late for the gate.

Even though we couldn’t get inside, we had another good look at the outside reliefs. They are very unusual because this is really the only well-preserved example of a Persian Period temple and you can see the transition in artwork between the Late Period and Ptolemaic, though the experts say there’s no link. The reliefs are very intricate and the hieroglyphs very well drawn but somehow simplistic. They are lovely. There is some surviving colour, especially the pale ‘Kharga green’ you don’t see anywhere else. Inside the temple is a very special relief of a blue-painted Seth with the head of a falcon, spearing the Apophis serpent. He is a unique desert god revered in the Oases and this temple especially, and this among other reliefs is what I wanted to look at (Sam of course has already been inside before).

After the temple we went back into Kharga and had lunch in a local restaurant in what appeared to be a main square. Sitting at a long wooden table among the workmen, the noise of Egyptian voices in their normal loud animated conversation was tremendous and echoed off the walls and high ceiling. By the time we went to a coffeeshop next door, my cold was getting worse and I was feeling rough. Salah was feeding me countless glasses of hot lemon juice with honey so that I felt like I was turning into a lemon. We had been told by the police that if we were not at the Bagdad checkpoint by 3.30pm we would not be able to leave the oasis today as they don’t allow people to drive on the desert road after dark. We spent as long as we could there, also buying lunch and drinks for four policemen. Eventually we left, driving back towards Baris and the desert road and passing Nadura and Qasr el-Ghueita fortresses in the distance. Unfortunately there was no time to visit anywhere else on a one-day trip.

There was a beautiful sunset on the way back and we had to stop so that Salah could take photographs with his new mobile phone camera which actually looked quite good. I took some paracetamol and fell asleep and woke up to find it was dark and the stars against the inky black sky were incredible. Nothing compares to a clear night sky in the lightless desert. There are a billion more stars than we ever see in the UK, or even in Luxor. We saw many shooting stars too, but it would have been much more enjoyable if I didn’t have a drippy nose and puffy eyes. We arrived back around 7.30pm and dropped Salah at the Luxor Mummification Museum where he had arranged to meet Christine and Jackie to go to a lecture. Sam and I went back to the hotel – she was really tired from driving most of the way so we had a drink and then an early night. I’m feeling really sad because tomorrow is our last day in Egypt.

We had arranged to Meet Christine and Jackie to go to Deir el-Medina, which is Christine’s favourite place. She is an Egyptologist who we have known for many years, but she only visited Egypt for the first time a couple of years ago as she was terrified of flying. I find it odd how so many Egyptologists have never been to Egypt, so that their knowledge is purely academic, while others who excavate in Egypt often never have time to visit any sites other than the ones they are working on. Ask almost any professional Egyptologist a question and unless it is their own particular field of interest they often cannot give you an answer. Christine and Jackie phoned us during breakfast and said they were too tired to go out today – so Sam & I drove over to the West Bank to Deir el-Medina anyway.

We walked through the workmen’s village to the temple and spent a couple of hours there, first looking at the outside walls and then the chambers inside. There is so much beautiful colour left here that we wanted to take digital pictures before it was no longer allowed. You can never tell, the way things are going. I think we photographed every scene in the temple. There are some beautiful and colourful depictions of the gods at Deir el-Medina and they are so well-preserved. Ptolemaic reliefs are not my strong suit and once more I was having difficulty in reading the hieroglyphs, which to me don’t seem to make sense.

After leaving the temple we walked back along the top of the workman’s village. As usual here we were accosted by men selling ‘genuine antiquities’ which they bring out of pockets in little tobacco tins in a very secretive way. I managed to get rid of them quite quickly by speaking Arabic – they soon lost interest, realising we were not gullible tourists, this usually works. Every time I walk through the village there seems to be more and more of it – I’m sure it’s growing.

Later we drove over to Medinet Habu for lunch. I left Sam in the cafe and went off into Habu Temple. I rushed around quite quickly, first in the shrines of the Divine Adoritix – two of them have been closed off with gates, with only the Amenirdis and Shepenwepet shrines open. Took photographs in the first and second courts and the rooms around the hypostyle hall, especially in the Osiris suite and then had a walk around the palace area. I have large albums crammed full of Habu pictures but wanted digital ones too. A gafir kept hassling for baksheesh, but as he hadn’t actually done anything I ignored him for once. There were plenty of other people there to hassle. I had an enjoyable hour and a half wandering around the temple – most of the other people only stayed for 15 minutes or so.

When I got back to the cafe some old friends of ours were there so I stopped to chat with them for a while. Sam had been talked into pricing up an AUC book order which had just come in and she was hidden under piles of books (she works for a book-seller in England). I helped too for a while and we soon got the job done. We have invited our friend Salah to come to Kharga with us tomorrow and we thought if we helped finish this job it was more likely that Shahat would give him the day off. He’s never been to Kharga and is quite keen to go. While pricing the books I found new copies of Aidan Dodson’s ‘Complete Royal Families’, a new book which Sam has just paid £20 second hand for in the UK. Here it was LE150 – about £13, so I had to buy it. It’s very heavy but too much of a bargain not to take it.

We left Habu around 5.00pm and drove back to the hotel for a quick shower and change before meeting up with Christine and Jackie at Salt & Bread restaurant near the Railway Station for dinner. Afterwards we all went to the Etap to hear Maha singing again (we are such creatures of habit). Sam and Christine proceeded to drink a bottle of wine each while I stuck to my ahwa on this occason.

Today was a day off sites. Sam & I had arranged to meet some friends, Christine and Jackie, who arrived yesterday from Cornwall and are staying at the St Josephs Hotel, just a little further up the road to the Novotel. We found them in their hotel, sitting over a leisurely prolonged breakfast on the roof terrace at 11.00am and claiming to be jetlagged. After catching up on news, we all sat lazily chatting around the tiny pool enjoying the warm sunshine for a couple of hours while Luxor busily carried on its business in the dusty streets far below. The weather is warming up at last to temperatures I’m more familiar with in Egypt and it was nice to be inactive for a while.

Promising to meet up later for dinner, Sam and I went back to the Novotel where we sat by the pool there too for the afternoon, this time with a few books each to keep us company. I tried to use my laptop but the sun was just too bright to see anything on the screen. Although I’ve stayed in the Novotel before I’ve never sat at the pool side. It’s built on a floating platform on the Nile and sitting there by the water is almost like being on a felucca. Looking up from my books now and then I could see many water-birds skimming over the surface of the river and the familiar hawks circling overhead against the sun. Even at this time of year the terraced gardens of the Novotel are very pretty, an oasis of green on a perfect day.

Later, we met up with Christine and Jackie at Maxims for dinner together, which as always was very good. Afterwards we all went to the Etap to hear Maha singing again. The tented area next to the main hotel was full of Egyptian families, which was nice to see, but so crowded that we had to sit outside and almost froze to death. After such a warm day it’s very easy to forget that it’s winter here and the nights can get very cold indeed. We left about midnight, my teeth chattering all the way back to my room.

At breakfast today Sam & I decided to drive up to Esna as neither of us have visited the temple there for a few years. Because the tourists are all south of Esna (at least the ones on cruiseships) the police have temporarily stopped the convoy between Luxor and Esna for the duration and we could drive there at our leisure. It was a lovely drive along the east bank – hardly any other vehicles on the road. We passed el-Moalla tombs and also saw Gebelien Hill in the distance.

Sam only got a little lost in Esna but that was due to the one-way system – an unusual experience in Egypt. The entrance to the bazaar leading to the temple is not easy to find when you’re driving past as it’s a very narrow lane and the temple is not signposted. We eventually found it by parking on the Corniche and walking. Got a little side-tracked in the bazaar while Sam bought a lovely bright red scarf and I tried on a really nice linen galabeya. Unfortunately they only had the particular galabeya I liked in extra large which was much too big for me. I told myself I really didn’t need it – I’d already bought a beautiful and very expensive ‘suede-look’ galabeya in Cairo. I have a passion for galabeyas which I wear all the time at home and have several winter ones from Cairo which are velvet or linen and warm enough for England. I don’t like the tourist ones you see in Luxor with lots of garish embroidery. We also found a lovely wikala very close to the temple. This is a medieval trading post and a sort of inn where merchants would stay and trade their wares. This one, hidden behind a stall in the bazaar, was a bit derelict but had some lovely carved woodwork.

We managed about an hour and a half in Esna Temple before the first lot of boat people turned up and took over the temple. First we walked around the outside walls looking at the reliefs of Roman emperors before various gods. Kings named are Titus, Domitian, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius and Caracalla. They wear an amazing array of decorative crowns. Divinities include Neith, Sobek, Khnum & Menhyt.

Inside the temple there has been quite a lot of restoration and cleaning done since I was last here and although it was very dark many of the reliefs were quite easy to photograph. There is also much more colour showing in some parts than I remember seeing before. These weird and wonderful Roman hieroglyphs continue to defeat me and I find it almost impossible to recognise and identify the names of the deities. I’m always intrigued by the crocodile and ram ‘cryptograms’ (or calendars?).

There are some lovely temple ritual scenes with some unusual deities – mostly upper Egyptian gods and many of the Elephantine deities are depicted. On one pillar there is a relief of four Meskhenyts with the same headdress we found on a god in the Seti Temple at Qurna. Another column has a curious relief of a king in an odd pose which looks like he’s dancing. He wears a long diaphanous kilt. The astronomical ceiling and the column capitals are particularly beautiful, as is the relief on the north wall of the king, Commodus hunting with a clapnet in the marshes with Khnum, Horus, Thoth and Sefkhet-wert.

After leaving the temple we walked back down through the bazaar and went to a coffee shop we’d noticed near where we parked the car. All of the cruiseboats are lined up along the corniche and occasionally a group of brave tourists will venture off a boat for a short stroll. As we were sitting (among the men) drinking our ahwa and Sam was having her shoes polished by a little boy, we noticed one cheeky bunch of tourists taking our photograph and videoing us. Yes, we’re the floorshow yet again!

We had a lovely leisurely drive back to Luxor. Thought about stopping at el-Moalla but decided that we probably wouldn’t be able to visit Ankhtifi’s tomb as there has been a lot of excavation there recently. Last time we went there we had to wait hours for the gafir with the key and it was pitch dark by the time we got into the tombs. They were very helpful on that occasion as they dragged a generator up the hill and we saw the reliefs by torchlight. Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures then. Wish I had! We also stopped so that I could take a picture of the distant hill of Gebelein with it’s distinctive sheikh’s tomb on the top – a site I have yet to visit.

Arriving back in Luxor around 5.00pm, Sam and I later went out to eat at Farag’s (green) restaurant on Yussef Hassan St. This is an Egyptian restaurant and the only veggy food they had was a tuna pizza (which was horrible). I should have stuck to my usual rice and vegetables, but it gets a bit boring by the third week. After we had eaten, our friend Salah phoned and invited us to the Etap where a friend of his from Cairo was singing. Her name is Maha and she has a very good voice – especially when singing Arabic songs including some Omm Kulthoum numbers. Bed by 2.00am.

We had quite a lazy morning today as Sam & I got up late. At breakfast we decided to go over to the West Bank again, this time to the Seti Temple at Qurna. It is supposed to have recently been re-opened, but I have never known it to be closed in the past eight years. I did notice that the processional way is more complete and new trees have been planted along the route. There are also some very nice blocks, now on risers and a good plan of the temple for visitors. The German restorers have done an excellent job. We began by looking at the many royal stelae near the remains of the first Pylon. I had never looked at these before.

We spent a lot of time in the chambers on either side of the hypostyle hall. There is always scaffolding in at least one of these rooms, making it difficult to take pictures and they are pretty dark and gloomy. We noticed one curious relief I’ve never paid much attention to, in the middle right-hand room. Seti is offering to a god, seated on a throne with an iunmutef fetish behind him. The peculiar thing about him is his headdress, which I have only ever seen on Meskhenet, a goddess of childbirth and destiny. Unfortunately the hieroglyphs are too high up and not clear enough when blown up to identify him. When I got back to the hotel I checked in Porter & Moss and they say this particular relief is Osiris! Isis and Anubis are behind him. I’ve never really noticed the lovely lintel in the Sanctuary either, with cartouches of Seti & Rameses.

There were many other interesting little scenes to look at. Every time I go to any of the temples there is always something else to see and I think it will always be like that. I was only a little disappointed because all of the outside scenes I wanted to photograph were bisected with deep shadows, so no good for pictures. We must have spent about three hours in the temple – so long that the gafir had given up trailing around after us and gone to sleep in a corner. He turned up for his baksheesh however, just as we were leaving.

Today was much hotter than it has been recently, just about perfect for me. We thought about calling in at the Ramesseum, but decided the Rameses Cafe at Habu was probably a better bet, so ended up there again around 3.00pm. Had a couple of drinks and chatted to Salah and Shahat for a while before leaving the West Bank, back across the bridge. Sam seems to be getting the hang of this driving business – she can even anticipate when a donkey-cart is about to do a U-turn on our side of the road or a tourist bus will try to run us into a canal! I really don’t know why they bother having two lanes on a road as nobody takes any notice of the white lines. You realise this as a huge truck comes hurtling towards you on your side of the road, stepping on the gas to overtake an invisible vehicle on their own side. Yesterday the police at the checkpoint had made a problem with Sam driving the car, wanting to see all her papers etc. (apparently there’s another one she’s supposed to have especially to drive in Luxor, but doesn’t). Today they just waved us through.

Back to the hotel for few hours to download pictures, have showers and chill out for a while before going for dinner. We ate at a new (to us) place below the Corniche called el-Khabagi. It was OK but quite expensive and a bit touristy. I’ve never known Luxor to be so quiet, except after the Deir el-Bahri incident a few years ago. The reason for this apparently is because there are no cruiseboats here, as the lock at Esna is closed and they are all staying upriver on the other side of the lock. There are hardly any tourists in Luxor at the moment. It’s like a ghost town at night. We had arranged to meet Abdul and the others at el-Kalaa coffeeshop at 10.00pm, but they didn’t turn up until almost midnight. Meanwhile we were the floorshow in an all-male coffee place where few tourists go, though it was OK because the staff know us now, though there were a few sly looks from the young guys playing dominoes. Another late night.

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